Integrated circuit (IC) devices comprising, for example, application processors that are targeted at many different products are required to support many different peripheral capabilities. In order to support such peripheral capabilities, the IC devices are required to comprise appropriate peripheral modules therefor. However, in practice only a subset of the supported peripheral capabilities will actually be used in any one product, resulting in the respective peripheral modules being superfluous and unused. Such superfluous peripheral modules waste die area and also are an unnecessary additional source of leakage power within the IC device.
Whilst some peripheral modules can be designed to support multiple peripheral capabilities, it is often the case that the individual peripheral modules are provided by external vendors, and as such the cost of in-house re-design of a single peripheral module to support multiple peripheral capabilities is significantly higher than that of the area saving.